Dimensional characteristics of the Filipino dentition

This study concerns odontometric analysis of the Tagalog Filipinos in Manila, Philippines. Mesiodistal and buccolingual dimensions of the permanent dentition, a total of 56 variables, were studied in 100 males and 152 females. Results showed that their absolute tooth size was small. Relative tooth size, however, seemed to reflect their Southeast Asian Mongoloid origin. From univariate analysis, considerable male-female differences were shown in most of the variables studied. When correlation effects among the teeth were held constant through multivariate analysis, male-female distance was found to be small and substantial overlapping of the two multivariate distributions was evident. Only four variables could be shown by stepwise discriminant analysis to contribute significantly to the distance. Even the mandibular canine, as the strongest discriminator, could only account for 16.4% of the total multivariate distance. These contrasting findings for sex dimorphism in a set of teeth taken singly and taken jointly indicate that there are factors other than the teeth themselves that are expected to play important roles in determining overall male-female size differences in the set of teeth, and that these differences may not be as clear-cut as univariate analysis suggests.